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Lotfi Zadeh wins 2017 Golden Goose Award

CS Prof. Emeritus Lotfi Zadeh has posthumously won a 2017 Golden Goose Award for "Fuzzy Logic, Clear Impact," sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The award honors teams of scientists whose silly-sounding taxpayer-funded research has returned serious benefits to society. "Zadeh proposed these revolutionary concepts in 1965 to deal with the mathematics and logic of imprecise information, receiving a skeptical response and howls of 'complete nonsense.' He even drew the attention of Senator William Proxmire and the infamous Golden Fleece Award. But since the concept's debut, the original research paper has become one of the most widely cited in history, used in more than 16,000 patents and applied to efficiency improvements for HVAC systems, healthcare devices and more." The winners will be honored at a ceremony at the Library of Congress this evening." Prof. Zadeh passed away earlier this month.

Anca Dragan wants autonomous cars to understand people

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan is one of the subjects of a San Francisco Chronicle article titled "Humanizing cars, sensitizing humans," about how the rise of robot vehicles will require reprogramming our relationship with them. Dragan was interviewed for the section on "emotional intelligence" and what a robot car sees. She said driverless cars will need to predict what humans on the road will do — and figure out how to behave appropriately around them. Dragan is testing a computer model of an autonomous vehicle which nudges toward the adjacent lane and detects whether the simulated human driver hits the brakes or the accelerator, fairly similar to how most people change lanes. “Those reactions tell it about your driving style, so it can anticipate whether it should merge or let you go first,” she said. “We’re excited to see that the car can ‘reason’ properly about people.”

Pulkit Agrawal is teaching machines how to be curious

CS Ph.D. student Pulkit Agrawal (advisers: Jitendra Malik and Jack Gallant) is the subject of a Quant Magazine article titled "Clever Machines Learn How to Be Curious." Agrawal is working at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab with CS grad student Deepak Pathak, Pathak's adviser Prof. Trevor Darrell, and CS Prof. Alexei A. Efros, to design experimental machine-learning algorithms which aim to "make a machine curious." They equipped their learning agent with what they call an intrinsic curiosity module (ICM) designed to pull it forward through a video game without going haywire, despite having no prior understanding of the game. “You can think of curiosity as a kind of reward which the agent generates internally on its own, so that it can go explore more about its world,” Agrawal said.

Research co-authored by EE Prof. Ali Javey has demonstrated that the power of photosynthesis can be harnessed to convert carbon dioxide into fuels and alcohols at efficiencies far greater than plants. The achievement marks a significant milestone in the effort to move toward sustainable sources of fuel. The study, titled "Efficient solar-driven electrochemical CO2 reduction to hydrocarbons and oxygenates," was led by Berkeley Lab postdoctoral fellow Gurudayal and co-authored by LBLpostdoctoral researcher James Bullock, who works in Javey's lab, among others. “This is a big step forward in the design of devices for efficient CO2 reduction and testing of new materials, and it provides a clear framework for the future advancement of fully integrated solar-driven CO2-reduction devices,” said Berkeley Lab chemist Frances Houle, who was not part of the study.

Kathy Yelick Charts the Promise and Progress of Exascale Science

CS Prof. Katherine Yelick is the subject of an interview in HPCwire in which she discusses the promise and progress of exascale science. The article follows on the heels of Yelick's keynote address on "Breakthrough Science at the Exascale" at the ACM Europe Conference in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month. The fastest supercomputers in the world today solve problems at the petascale—that is a quadrillion calculations each second. Exascale computing refers to systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second. Yelick's research interestes include parallel programming languages, compilers, algorithms and automatic performance tuning. She is the Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Jan Rabaey wins 2017 SRC Aristotle Award

EE Prof. Jan Rabaey has won the 2017 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award. The award recognizes SRC-supported faculty whose deep commitment to the educational experience of SRC students has had a profound and continuing impact on their professional performance and, consequently, a significant impact for members over a long period of time. Rabaey was cited for having "made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including advanced wireless systems, low power integrated circuits, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation integrated wireless systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological world." The award was presented at TECHCON 2017 on September 12th.

Symposium will celebrate the scholarship of Edward A. Lee

The Edward A. Lee Festschrift Symposium will be held on October 13th at the Berkeley City Club to celebrate the scholarship and teaching of Edward A. Lee, the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor in EECS. The theme of the symposium is "Principles of Modeling" and is dedicated to Lee's devotion to research that centers on the role of models and the principled use of models in science and engineering. Speakers include Hans Vangheluwe , Jie Liu , Radu Grosu , Thomas Henzinger, Janette Cardoso, and Richard Murray.

Ruzena Bajcsy wins 2017 John Scott Award

EECS Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy has won the 2017 John Scott Award which has been presented by the City of Philadelphia since 1822 to "the most deserving men and women whose inventions have contributed in some outstanding way to the comfort, welfare and happiness of mankind." Bajcsy's award is for her contributions to robotics and engineering science, including the development of improved robotic perception and the creation of better methods to analyze medical images. Many luminaries have received the award including Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Jonas Salk and Glenn Seaborg. Bajcsy will share the award with Warren Ewens (theoretical population genetics) and Masatoshi Nei (evolutionary theory).

John DeNero named inaugural Charles and Dianne Giancarlo Teaching Fellow

CS Assistant Teaching Professor John DeNero is the inaugural recipient of the Charles and Dianne Giancarlo Teaching Fellowship. This fellowship supports excellence in undergraduate teaching in EECS and was made possible by a generous donation from alumnus Charles Giancarlo (EE M.S. '80) and his wife, Dianne (co-founder of the Women’s Achievement Network and Development Alliance). The College of Engineering will be hosting a reception to celebrate the appointment on September 19th.

Scott Shenker wins 2017 Berkeley Visionary Award

CS Prof. Scott Shenker has won a 2017 Visionary Award from the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. The award was created to acknowledge entrepreneurs and "celebrate people with the imagination and persistence to innovate in the City of Berkeley." Shenker co-founded Nicira, a company focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization, which was sold to VMware in 2012 for $1.26 billion. The award will be presented at ceremony at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre on September 11th.